


Dispatches from the Zombie Express

by Rethwellan



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Gen, non-cannon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 09:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19081915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rethwellan/pseuds/Rethwellan
Summary: Faced with a world much changed since the outbreak of the zombie virus, a lone reporter sets out to document the effect it has had on people and communities she encounters





	Dispatches from the Zombie Express

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Though this is set in such a way that it should be spoiler free, references are made to characters first encountered in Season 2. There will also only be minimal interaction with Abel, with mainly references being made and the odd radio contact. I like the world and felt like writing within it.

“Have you completely lost what little sense you had left, Gerri?! I know we’re in the middle of the apocalypse, but honestly, committing suicide is not the answer here!”

Douglas’ voice filters through the remains of the old newspaper office as I continue to lay my belongings and supplies out on the camp bed I’ve set up in the most heavily barricaded corner. It had taken a bit of work, a few days pouring over technical manuals, and a large amount of cursing as I shocked myself on numerous occasions, but I had managed to set up the radio’s speakers in the editor’s office and rig my handheld to transmit to it. Yeah, it was an indulgence, but it felt right to have my editor shouting at me from there rather than directly in my ear. When I was on assignment, of course.

“I’m not committing suicide,” I huffed, “I’m doing the job you’re paying me for.”

Okay, now, lets see. A couple pairs of spare underwear, check. Socks, Check. Lightweight running kit, long sleeve top, and light rain poncho. Check, check, and double check.

“Cut the brown nosing, Gerri. We both know I don’t pay you, hell, we’ve never actually met face to face. You basically just started sending me articles and then bugged me until I started posting them. If you could have figured out how to hack The Wincanton Heralds Rofflenet site, you would have posted the damn things yourself!”

I smirked at that, knowing that if it wasn’t for the fact that I didn’t trust my spelling further than the end of my nose, I would have done exactly that. But it was always good to have a few extra tricks up one’s sleeves. Never knew when Douglas would decide that my articles were too flammable to be posted. Eventually, he would realise that using his favourite pre-Z author’s name as his password might not have been his best move. But until then … _water purification tablets, canteen, head torch_ … Where the hell did I leave the head torch!?

“Just think about it for a minute okay? You’re not Golightly. You don’t have an entire township willing to step up and haul that ass of yours out of trouble. You’ll be out there on your own, surviving on the kindness of strangers, and having to duck and weave from the greatest foe we’ve encountered in the history of humanity!”

“Hang on there, Douglas. Would you like me to send you a trowel to slather the histrionics on more thickly? I’m sure I can find a runner looking for supplies to deliver it to you on their next trip down south,” I interrupted him, returning to my bed with the torch after retrieving it from the hook above the gas stove. I shouldn’t have hung the torch from there when I was cooking last night. Anything and anyone could have been attracted by its light. Hunger, exhaustion, and sheer orneriness after a long day retrieving supplies meant I barely cared. Meh, I think it had done no harm.

“And obviously I don’t think I’m Golightly. That yellow bellied idiot claims to be in search of the truth, but basically just bumbles around and falls into situations that Abel have to bail him out of. Anyone who bothers to compare his accounts with the reports Yao keeps tossing up on to Rofflenet can see that. He would also need a new pair of brown pants if he even considered doing what I’m proposing.”

The radio crackles with static and I’m not sure whether its covering laughter or choking noises. Douglas’ opinion of the intrepid reporter out of Abel mirrored mine, but since he was also one of our few remaining colleagues actually producing content, he preferred not to disparage the man too often. While he pulled himself together and prepared for his next condemnation of my plan, I picked my way between the broken desks and overturned chairs to a dusty window and peered at the road below. Abandoned cars were rusting over as each day took them farther away from the last time their engines turned over. Nature was starting to wrench her own back, though that mostly resulted in overgrown yards and smaller woodland creatures making a mess of things. In this case, a fox skulked in and out of doorways, sniffing the wind and pouring through what little junk remained in trash cans.

I breathed a little easier seeing this. If the animals weren’t acting wary, then it was likely all was clear. I didn’t like that there was little to no bird noise, but it just meant I would have to be more on the lookout as I moved towards the outskirts of town. Turning away, I began to swiftly fold up my little gas stove and move it to the bed as Douglas started up again,

“Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know? Come now, Gerri. There are so few of us covering local events as it is. What with the militia on the roads, the hordes waiting to pounce wherever you go, and the general levels of paranoia that infest most of the settlements, travelling the countryside is a recipe for … well … suicide.”

“Please,” he begins to weedle now, “just stay where you are. You’re safe, the settlements know you and are willing to trade with you, and you have everything you need to do the job without putting yourself in more danger just to find a scrap of paper to write on.”

My cheeks alight at his words, memories flooding back unbidden. Safe? No, I wasn’t safe! Not any more. Too many people now knew where I made my bed. This week alone I’d already fended off a pair of looters and that bastard Mason from over in the Burrows. As their runner with the most kills to his name, he felt he deserved an ‘interview’ and didn’t I want to ‘get dome deep background’ on him. Yech! I shuddered at the leer I was subjected to when he approached me. The problem was, I knew his favourite way of handling people that crossed him. I had watched him waiting patiently for them to venture past the safety of the walls of their settlement before springing his revenge too often. The last thing I needed at the moment was horde clawing through my door.

At that thought I turned toward the empty door frame and shattered desk with the small ‘Editor in chief’ plague balanced precariously on two pulled out drawers.

"Douglas, I am done being a glorified transcriber. We both know half my job has become listening to messages between runners and their operators or reading their posted reports to find out what juicy complications they’ve encountered in the field. If it’s not that, I’m reporting on the same town hall arguments every other week and what Old Lady Dawcet’s tabby did to cause the armory at Deacons to be evacuated. The most exciting thing that has happened to me in months was when the kids from the farms stole the moonshine and spare fireworks and had an impromptu Guy Fawkes. By the time I got there they were battling it out with a dozen zoms, making creative use of said fireworks. None of the settlements will let me go out with their runners. They keep hearing about what Golightly does at Able and think I’m forged from the same incompetence. Between that and the zoms, my sources are drying up or dying off.

“I need to be doing more, I need to be experiencing more. Hell, you keep on complaining that readership is declining. Didn’t the last few ‘Letters to the Editor’ you got beg for more information about what is going on in the wider world? I want to be out there doing that. And you know you can’t wait to be able to claim you have the first roving reporter on your books since the z-day really got going.”

Silence greeted my words and I got back to checking supplies and packing my kit. Of course, I wasn’t mentioning the numerous times I had combed the city, working on a series of articles about what looters chose to loot, destroy, or preserve. Sneaking through the museums and galleries, climbing in windows to marvel at the opulence of some of the rich and famous, it intrigued me to no end how people reacted in this new world structure. I had worked long and hard to put my thoughts together and the pages were waiting to transmit as soon as I left radio range. Douglas would have kittens once he realised what I had been doing to get the research. And if he knew about all my close escapes.

Stopping my packing I took a brief eternity to survey my home for the last few months. An old abandoned newspaper office. I had been striving to end up in a place like this ever since I left university. A resume of articles from my time on the student paper and a few example pieces I had worked on in my own time had me confident I could get a job as a junior reporter and work my way up the ranks. But as the saying went in those days, _print was dying and no-one was hiring_. I tried to do the weblog thing for a while and even got some interest but I hadn’t had that one story that got you noticed. And then it all went to hell. And I got my wish. Just not the way I wanted it.

So now I stood among the broken and trampled remains of cubicles, desks and upturned chairs. In one corner I had moved and piled a number of pieces together to form a barricade I could safely sleep behind.

Pin boards were also positioned to make it more difficult to tell how things had been set up and I had strung strings with tiny bells at various heights in the entry corridors to provide warnings. The walls were covered in old articles, some having hung in their neat little frames since before my arrival. The rest, those that I had found whilst combing through the archives, were simply pinned wherever I had been holed up at the time. In the dark times, in those moments when I needed hope or inspiration, I would look to them, drawing encouragement from these stories of human accomplishment, of the triumph over the darkness that existed even before the outbreak. These were the sorts of stories I wanted to return to the world.

Off to the side, one wall was absent of articles. Instead it was covered by a map of the town and the surrounding communities. Pins and sticky notes marked the latest sightings of trouble, human or zom, and spots I needed to keep an eye on. I would be sad to not have something like that anymore, but one thing about setting out into the unknown was … well … figuring out the unknown. That was part of the allure.

As I turned back to finish my packing, adding some dried and packaged food into my bag, Douglas let out a long sigh. “You know I hate the idea, but I know you’re going to do whatever you want to anyway. You’re taking precautions, I hope?”

“Yes, Dad,” I reply, pitching my voice to the right teenage rebellion tone. I make sure he hears the sound the cylinder makes as I spin and then click it into my revolver. I only have a dozen spare cartridges, but they will have to do. That all goes into a special compartment on one side of my pack, while the t-bar knife I scavenged goes into a similar pocket on the other side.

“Don’t expect me to come bail you out when you get into trouble, I’m not that type of parent. And if you get yourself killed out there Gerri, you better believe I will find your rotting corpse and send it to its final rest myself.”

“Love you too,” I chuckle and tuck the notebook and pencil where cellphones used to sit and then gently stow my prized possession, an old battery operated tape recorder, into a special pouch within easy reach. Looking now at the too small, but still too heavy, pack, I grab hold of my nerves and stop the thoughts of impending doom from surfacing again. This is what I want to do. This is what I have to do.

“Look, we have a plan in place,” I note as I swing the pack up and onto my shoulders, “I will check-in whenever I hit a settlement and transmit digitized recordings when I can or type up an article if I get a chance.” Or pay someone to do all the boring bits. I mean, who the hell wants to take the time to transcribe something they had already written on Rofflenet just to send it to Douglas. Not me, not with everything going on out there. Let some other poor sod do that while I barreled ever onward.

“You drop any editorial notes into my mailbox as needed and I will deal with them at my next stop. Otherwise it’s no different from a foreign correspondent in a war zone,” I finish brightly.

“You say that like you’ve ever been in a war zone,” Douglas mutters, but before I can interject, he beats me to it, “and yes, I realise that we’ve all basically been living in a perpetual war zone. Don’t start, Gerri. You’re getting your way, just take the win. And please, for the love of all, please be careful. I really don’t want to write your obituary.”

“I can see it now,” I quip, “Intrepid reporter Geraldine Renier, so persistent to get the story that she got herself bit just to catalogue the process for her readers.”

“More like the personification of the chicken that crossed the road only to get hit by a mac truck.”

“Nah, not enough gas around for any of those things to still be around. Hmm, however, if I do make it across the ocean, that might actually be a concern.”

Another silence greets my words, and I find myself standing before the editor’s desk, my hand poised above the switch to turn off the radio. That soft click will severe my last real link to Douglas and the small office he has down in Wincanton. Or at least that’s what I imagine it is and since I have no clue what those crazy genre geeks have set him up with, it’s as good a place to start as any.

“Good luck, Gerri,” he finally whispers, a real note of sadness carrying through, “if anyone can make it to the coast and keep on going, it’s probably you. Or 5. Definitely 5.” Silence falls again and then, “Just, you know, look after yourself.”

My voice roughens a touch as emotions bubble over and I include goodbyes in my list of experiences I’ve grown to dislike. “Thanks, Douglas. You were the JJ to my Peter and I appreciate you watching out for me. But now it’s time for me to raise the gates. Any chance you can provide covering fire in 5?”

“Sure, just leave the channel open, I think I can sort something out.”

“You’re a germ, Douglas. See you on the flip side.”

“See you on the flip side,” he replies and my hand moves away from the switch instead of shutting it off.

* * *

Quickly and quietly I slide around and over my alarm bells, finally getting to the end of the corridor that leads to the back stairs. Gliding down them, I avoid the headless corpses and pieces of rubble that litter the stairwell, the remnants of the stampede as the first attacks occurred and then the later fire fights waged by myself and previous occupants with interlopers. I neatly avoid the broken bottles and goopy puddles that threaten to injure or attract attention, the result of urban decay in action.

Finally, I reach the rusty door to the outside, a large and heavy piece of metal that has yet to be penetrated. The door swings open, silent on oiled hinges, and I do a quick glance into the alley for signs of unlife.

Nothing stirs, not a breath of wind, not a stray cat, not a moaning undead. Nature seems to have turned its attention elsewhere in this moment. It’s eerie, unnerving, unreal. There must be something lurking out there and all I can hope is that Douglas’ distraction can catch it’s attention. Forcing the door a little wider, I creep out, taking cover behind dumpsters and crumbling brick, inching ever closer to the mouth of the alley.

I come close to jumping out my skin as the first triumphant cords of the Imperial March pour from the front of the newspaper office, echoing through the streets. It appears the dead have been provided with a new rallying cry. Despite my fright, I grin at the choice and can imagine all of Douglas’ compatriots cheering him on. My grin fades as I hear a scraping of feet along pavement from just outside the alley and, ducking back, I watch as a zombie hauls itself towards the sound.

It’s a shambler, one of the many that infest the town, but not one that rose since I arrived. Happy to not recognize the rotting face it wears, I wait a half minute after it passes, duck across the street to another side road, and continue my slow exit of the town. It takes an hour of ducking into and out of abandoned buildings to reach the outskirts. A few times I have to hold my breath as I encounter zoms drawn toward the music, but once it cuts off I see few of the critters. This area has been abandoned for so long that the pickings are few and the zoms have moved to greener pastures, making it an ideal, if still slow, route out.

Eventually I find myself crouched behind the petunias in a small garden at the end of the last lane. Beyond the fence before me stretches rolling fields that are now choked with weeds and rabbit burrows. The sky stretches forth, wispy clouds far above providing the illusion of the jet streams that once marked the blue. Forests that have surged to life colour the distant horizon, an impenetrable shadow on the landscape.

It all beckons me forth, an adventure, a story, an exposé waiting to be written. This may not have been the career I imagined for myself in my youth, but it has become my dream in this remade world. As I take a final pedestrian glance to check the way is clear, I realise I have neglected one major decision as I begin my journey. Keeping my eyes trained on the surroundings, my senses wide to potential danger, my mind starts to throw up ideas.

It needs to capture my intention and my audience. It needs to capture the times and the atmosphere. It can’t be too corny or too droll. And it must be me.

As each kilometer passes me by and I toss aside one idea after another, I fall into a zen like state.

And then, like a zombie busting through a ceiling, it hits me.

 _Dispatches from the Zombie Express_ sounds like a good title for a column.


End file.
